For years, gamers have been forced to watch, with varying results, as their favorite games get poorly adapted to the silver screen. Some adaptations have been better than others, but from a critical standpoint, there hasn't been a single adaptation that's received anything but horrible reviews. Why is that? How is it that out of the dozens of films based on video games that are out there, that none of them are critical successes? There are a few reasons, actually.

For starters, much of the time, the people involved with adapting the game are less interested in crafting something that's watchable and more interested in the money they can make off a brand that's already familiar to millions of people. This is obvious in films like Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, Max Payne, and Prince of Persia, all of which only loosely follow the video games. The Resident Evil series in particular has made it a habit of taking concepts from the games and tossing them into the film without much purpose other than to say "Hey, these should be familiar to gamers!"

More often than not, these films turn into money-making blockbusters that aren't too bad. I'll openly admit that I've seen all of the Resident Evil films and, up until the third one, have actually enjoyed them. All you have to do is go in with incredibly low expectations, switch off your brain, and grab some popcorn.

Occasionally, a video game gets adapted despite having essentially none of the components that make it suitable for the big screen. Elements like an interesting story or cast of characters are entirely missing from Wing Commander, Super Mario Bros., Doom, and any of the films based on fighting games. These are also blatantly obvious money grabs, but whereas games in the first group have something going for them, these really don't. This could be because of an empty void where a story should be (Wing Commander) or a lack of any interesting characters (Super Mario Bros., the fighting game movies), but the result is always an awful movie. Mortal Kombat is fun because of its visceral combat (kombat?), not because I want to get to know any of its characters.

Then there are the abominations, the films that simply have no reason to exist.